


House For All People Who Have Nowhere To Go

by Go0se



Category: Marble Hornets
Genre: Coda, Gen, Hope, Nondenominational Christian, Not Beta Read, Post-Series, have the raised-pagan lady write about an agnostic finding Christian faith this can't cause problems
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-20
Updated: 2015-09-20
Packaged: 2018-04-22 13:57:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,754
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4837811
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Go0se/pseuds/Go0se
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Faith dawned on Tim slowly.</p>
            </blockquote>





	House For All People Who Have Nowhere To Go

**Author's Note:**

> Another expository one from the archives! fildi. Thought it'd be interesting for Tim to find a sense of Higher Purpose(tm) instead of rejecting it as popular fanon had him do. As the tag up there implies I was indeed raised a pagan kid with ~loosely Wiccan~ flavouring and I haven't had any non-incidental experiences with church communities since then. Any missteps or misinformation here is my fault alone.  
> Title is from "1 Samuel 15:23" by The Mountain Goats. The bible verse that the song is named after decries the sin of witchcraft; the song itself is about the time that JD (TMG's main singer/lyricist dude) became a crystal healer and administered to all of the sick who he could find.  
> \-------

Faith had dawned on Tim slowly. It waited until after he'd uploaded the last entry, after he'd ditched the boxes and boxes of tapes to someone with access to a incinerator who'd promised to destroy them in bulk without questions. He'd cancelled the service contract to his cell phone and driven north-east along the coast until he'd run out of land.

  
Houlton, Maine was where he'd ended up. A mid-sized church of clapboard walls and sharply angled ceilings sat across the street from his collapsing point. Tim had wandered into it in the middle of the afternoon, lost and tired and searching for a connection to something. Anything. The church looked just generic enough to be familiar.   
Inside, sunlight gleamed through ornate stained-glass windows onto pews and polished floor. More surprising was the calm pastor who met him at the door.  She hadn't asked where he'd come from. Instead she'd offered him water and some potato salad that had been donated from a wedding, and told him he didn't have to speak if he'd rather not.  
Tim had been pretty sure she thought he was homeless. He was, so it didn't bother him. He'd almost refused the salad though; hadn't wanted her charity, knew it'd do more if saved for people who really needed it and weren't just running from a mess they'd caused. But, on the other hand, he was hungry. The pack of off-brand protein bars he'd brought along the way there had started turning his stomach after the second day in the car. As a compromise he hadn't said anything except 'thank you' the whole time he was inside the building. True to her word, Pastor Brown didn't ask him to. She didn't ask him anything.  
  
  
He stayed in Houlton because it seemed as good as any other place. At first he slept in his car, getting by in the mornings in fast food franchise's bathrooms. He used the local library to look for employment. An unscrupulous warehouse business eventually took him on for a shitty delivery job, and he took odd tasks around town for extra cash. It meant long hours and sore muscles but the exhaustion was good for him.   
He even found a doctor and sliding-scale therapist that were willing to help treat him. The doctors had no idea his history, except the extremely edited version he shared and the slightly forged documents he brought along. It was something of an empty gesture. Tim still hadn't told anyone about Jay, or Brian, or Jessica, or least of all _Alex_ , any of it, and he never would. But medications were medications, and when the paperwork cleared he was relieved to find his last doses still worked. The last few weeks had been getting... difficult without them.

Life was a little more certain after that. It was still exhausting and mind-numbing but he could breathe.

Eventually he built up something resembling roots again. When he had enough money scraped together he graduated himself from sleeping in his car to renting a tiny apartment. The main selling point to the place was that it was cheap. It wasn't pretty, but it didn't need to be pretty.  He was the only one looking at it.  
He bought curtains to cover the skeleton windows and a hot plate since neither the stove or oven worked. After a few months he treated himself to an actual proper mattress instead of the lone sleeping bag and road-pillow he'd used since leaving Alabama.  
Tim started to get bored sometimes, instead of always being occupied working or sleeping or panicking or staring exhaustedly into nothing at all. The battered kitchen table the previous tenant had left behind slowly became covered with short paperbacks and newspapers he'd read.  
After a year, Tim even got a secondhand guitar. 

  
He returned to the clapboard church several times on weekdays, avoiding Sunday because it would've been too much. He went mostly as a lack of anywhere else to be outside of work, partly as a truce to his need for company. He didn't say anything of note to the pastor, or the congregants. No one asked him too. But Pastor Brown kept preaching about acceptance in all aspects, which he somehow felt was directed at him. And people kept offering him things: a coffee, to come along to a group barbecue, a Christmas gift share. He wondered if they were always this nice to the new guy or if the pastor had instructed special treatment of him in particular.

During his walks home Tim wondered about the usefulness of any of it. The congregants' kindness. Him going there at all. None of them actually knew anything about him, they couldn't help the ache he carried around. But the illusion of not being isolated was better than no illusion at all.  
  
  
Tim started showing up for Sunday mass because the casual weekday visits had had the opposite effect he'd intended; made his loneliness worse instead of better. He kept showing up because, shockingly, the words that Pastor Brown offered out from her spot at the front of the church were things he didn't mind to hear.  
He wasn't sure when the sermons started having an actual effect on him. It was sometime after the first year. It was the pastor herself; she was open, and didn't even stand behind a pulpit like others might've, just at the front of the church with her hands gesturing or clasped earnestly in front of her. She was _kind._ Base-level kind, and hell if he'd known anyone like that for a long time.  
  
He'd never belonged with a church before. He'd been to some, of course. Living in the South you can't avoid Christianity for long, and he'd never actively tried. Tim had grown up with it. His name and his mothers' name both came from the Bible: Janet, from John, _God is gracious_ ; and Timothy, _one who honours Him_. His mother had been casually Protestant. He'd been able to hear her praying through the walls of their apartment when he was a little kid. She'd prayed for help: health and luck, a better job, for the doctors to understand what was wrong with her son and then for him to be able to get better and then just for a reprieve of his pain. But she'd never really talked to him about it, and they spent Sunday nights on the couch watching movies.  
Then, in the hospital, religion wasn't something people talked of much at all. Maybe the doctors didn't want to give him and the other kids in the ward ideas. Things that could arguably be called demons had chased all of the patients in there, after all. Medication, exorcism, it'd all get almost too easy to compare-- in poems, maybe. But Tim wasn't a poet. He'd just taken the pills with water and food like they'd told him to and tried not to give in to the occasional whispers at the edge of his brain, the pulls that woke him, especially at night.  
Brian had went to church. Tim had never gone with him. It was something that seemed private and Tim hadn't wanted to intrude. He'd had enough other things to do.

  
Even now, Tim was never going to become a clergy member or anything. He wasn't going to be in those weird reality TV commercials where people rhapsodized about being saved. He wasn't a lot of things. Neither was religion, as it turned out.   
God wasn't a fix for what was broken in him. Tim knew he'd never get entirely better.   
God wasn't a set of ironclad rules he could live by; Tim had broken too many rules and promises (to himself and everyone else) to trust them.  
God wasn't a safe place. Even after Tim started going to mass regularly the nightmares still came; ringing ears and forest paths that were also highways with no exits anywhere, or a shot and a stumbling friend and himself standing in the wall unable to move or stop any of it. Tim didn't know why bad things happened to good people. He didn't ask. He tries to be a good person but he thought, sometimes, that he's failing. Every terrible thing he'd done stuck in his memory, technicolour, seen through his own eyes or a digital camera's lens. God wasn't forgiveness.  
Pastor Brown and Doctor Earle (his Houlton therapist) told him there were things he didn't need to be sorry for, and he knew that, but he'd had literal blood on his hands. Under his hands, too, pressing the pavement where his friend had waited too long for him. There was no other power that had taken Tim, that time. His actions were his alone. God wasn't an excuse, either.   
  
Tim hadn't been hoping for it to be. If anything, realizing how measured he felt about the church made him trust it more.  
God, to Tim, was... a kind of comfort. It was the idea that there was something other than That Thing which took lost souls and guided them somewhere, afterwards. God was the thought that, even when the worse parts of the darkness in his head blanketed everything, it was impossible for him to be really alone outside himself.  
God was a connection to something bigger than himself that didn't panic him.

  
The church, meanwhile, was a human place full of good people. Even after a year and a half Tim felt a little like he's dangerous just sitting in the pews. He didn't think he could give anything good to a community that was so bizarrely kind to him, but he couldn't bring himself to pull away anymore. Every Sunday now he went to mass and saw faces that have become familiar to him. He shared quick smiles with them and wished them peace.  
He took a few minutes at the end of the service for himself. The general susurrus of everyone gathering their coats kept him grounded, comfortable enough to close his eyes. He kept his hands pressed together in front of his face and leaned his forehead onto the smooth varnished wood of the pew in front of him. He didn't think in circles of what he could have done better, or different, or not at all.

He was beginning to let go of all of it. Not forget it--for once in his life he can't forget--but it didn't have to hurt him anymore. He prayed for his dead.  
It gives him some rest. It's enough.  
  
  
///

 


End file.
